Mariger and O'Brien Named ‘Lawyers of the Year’

09/24/2013

Best Lawyers selected two Jones Waldo attorneys as Salt Lake City’s “Lawyers of the Year.” The annual award recognizes attorneys for excellence in their individual practice areas. Craig R. Mariger is “Best Lawyers 2014 Salt Lake City Construction Law Lawyer of the Year,” and Michael Patrick O’Brien is “Best Lawyers 2014 Salt Lake City First Amendment Lawyer of the Year” and “Best Lawyers 2014 Salt Lake City Labor and Employment Lawyer of the Year.”

Mariger, who has held several leadership positions at the firm, represents participants in the construction industry with respect to construction planning, contracting, claim resolution and litigation and was the national construction counsel to a Fortune 500 company. This is Mariger’s second year winning the award.

O’Brien, who works actively with the national and local Society for Human Resource Management, counsels employers on managing and minimizing employee risks. For his work, O’Brien was awarded SHRM’s Capitol Award, given to just one of its 170,000 members each year. As a First Amendment and Litigation Lawyer, O’Brien assists news and publishing organizations in obtaining access to places and records, minimizing risks of defamation, invasion of privacy, torts and other publishing matters. His clientele includes The Salt Lake Tribune, CNN, the Deseret News and the Associated Press.

Best Lawyers, the oldest and most respected international peer-review publication in the legal profession, has designated “Lawyers of the Year” in high-profile legal specialties in large legal communities. Only a single lawyer in each specialty in each community is being honored as “Lawyer of the Year.” Best Lawyers compiles its lists of outstanding attorneys by conducting exhaustive peer-review surveys of more than 36,000 attorneys, with the 2013 edition based on more than 4.4 million detailed evaluations of lawyers by other lawyers.